


There is More to Living Than Not Dying

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Canon Era, Gen, M/M, Vampire Jem, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 14:05:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7511195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d died in battle. They hadn’t known the vampire blood that had been fed to him before he could finish bleeding out from a violent wound in his stomach. The body had been stolen even before it could be taken to the Silent City. It had been stolen and put here. He’d been buried in a shallow grave by a monster that had wanted to make him into something he’d hated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There is More to Living Than Not Dying

The plot of dirt didn’t have a stone. Consecrated ground but not in line with the little plots in the graveyard. It was still overturned. No one had noticed and come to smooth out the mess. Will stared at it and tried to stop his churning imagination. They hadn’t known. He’d died in battle. They hadn’t known the vampire blood that had been fed to him before he could finish bleeding out from a violent wound in his stomach. The body had been stolen even before it could be taken to the Silent City. It had been stolen and put here. He’d been buried in a shallow grave by a monster that had wanted to make him into something he’d hated.

Will tried to imagine him crawling out of the ground, shaking and hungry and lost. He would still be Jem. The stories about vampires as soulless killers had never felt true to Will. He would be Jem. Jem with blood soaked clothing and dirt matted into his silver hair. Will kicked at the earth. It had taken days to find this place after they’d realized what had happened. Camille Belcourt was gone. Most of DeQuincey’s coven had been destroyed and the casualties for the Clave had been few. Will could still remember overhearing that. The casualties had been few and it had been a victory but one of the casualties had been Jem and Will would never forgive that. He couldn’t forgive the vampires who had turned him or the Shadowhunters who had dismissed him as one of an acceptable number of casualties.

He had forgiven Tessa. Tessa who had sat at her brother’s side and who had sobbed when she’d heard what had happened. She barely knew Jem and she at least understood the loss that the world had suffered. She blamed herself for putting him in harm’s way and in a moment of impossible madness, Will had pulled her into a hug and whispered promises into her hair that it wasn’t her fault. He had made sure he was never in the same room as her since. No one else had seen the cracks in his emotions. Everyone else stayed on the other side of the safe wall he had built up. Everyone else believed he was utterly heartless and it was better that way.

Jem was dead.

Everyone who loves you will die.

Jem was dead and yet he had crawled back up out of this grave. He had crawled out of the grave and hadn’t come home. Will took a moment to gather a little bit of grave dirt into a small bottle that he could bury in his pocket. He hoped it was true that vampires knew where they had been buried and the myths of grave dirt held some sway. His parabatai rune was empty but he wasn’t willing to give up on every connection.

“Don’t you dare walk out into the sun. You were worth more than all of them when you were alive and you still are,” he told the ground, imagining that Jem could hear him. Then he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer of thanks and love and hope in Welsh and turned to walk home.

* * *

Jem couldn’t enter the Institute grounds but he could get up on the wall. Technically, it was illegal. Technically, he was trespassing but it had been two weeks and no one had noticed yet. From here, this exact corner of the wall, he could see Will’s window. 

The stories said that vampires always came home and when they did it was to terrorize their loved ones. And so he stayed away. He wouldn’t terrorize them. He just needed the glimpses, the reminders that they had survived when he hadn’t. 

Someday he would be brave enough to end this second life he’d been given. Someday he would stay out past dawn and just move on but he couldn’t, not yet. 

There were too many unanswered questions. Dangers chasing Will and the Branwells and Tessa with her gray eyes and that rare beautiful smile. He couldn’t abandon them. Not when they weren’t safe. He crossed his arms across his stomach because he was hungry and his self loathing peaked at every meal so he was putting it off. 

Will wasn’t using the lamps, he must have been carrying a witchlight because the light bounced around the room casting erratic shadows. He couldn’t see Will. He had caught glimpse some nights but Will wasn’t one for staring out windows so Jem resigned himself to watching shadows and flickering curtains as his proof that his parabatai was still alive. 

The light finally flickered out and the window fell dark.  

“Sweet dreams,” Jem whispered and then dropped back down off the wall to go deal with his hunger. 

* * *

“Did you drop this?” Jem said it without thinking about it. He picked up the bill fold and held it out without looking at the person who had dropped it. He still found living people difficult to deal with. It wasn’t so much the hunger as it was the understanding that he wasn’t as they were anymore. He had only been a vampire for a few lonely months and every breathing person with their future laid out before them reminded him that he had lost it all.

The swearword wasn’t English but it was so familiar that Jem’s chest seized up even before he looked up. Will grabbed hold of his jacket and swung him around into an alleyway and slammed him back against the wall. It hurt. The little gasp he made came out as an inhuman hiss. Will stared at him with wide eyes. Jem stared back. Temporary. He wasn’t allowed more than a few moments of staring at Will before he would have to go back to surviving on little glimpses through crowds or from distant windows.

“Where have you been?” Will asked and his voice wasn’t nearly as hostile as the fist in his shirt or the alarm in his eyes.

“Dead,” Jem said.

“Is that so? I thought the hole in the ground was just an unusual new pastime,” Will shot back. In spite of everything, in spite of the hollow space in his chest where his heart didn’t beat, and the unshakable cold, and every lonely night, Jem laughed. Will let go of his jacket and folded him into a hug. Will somehow managed to wrap himself all the way around Jem and make him feel small and safer than he had imagined possible. He smelled familiar. Like home.

Jem turned his face into Will’s neck and held on. He didn’t realize until some vampire instinct twinged at the scent of blood below skin that this was dangerous. Will didn’t flinch. Will held on like he wasn’t some sort of monster. Jem forced himself to pull in the smell of blood and skin and soap and that old dusty smell of the Institute until he was calm enough that the monster instinct retreated.

“I’m sorry, William,” Jem said.

“For what? You have nothing to apologize for, nothing at all,” Will said.

“I left you,” Jem said, “You needed me and I wasn’t there.”

“I’m the one who wasn’t there. It shouldn’t have been you. You didn’t deserve this,” Will said. Jem didn’t answer that. He took another deep breath of that smell of home and pressed in a little closer.

“Come home,” Will said.

“I can’t set foot in that building and you know it,” Jem said.

“So we’ll find someplace for ourselves,” Will said, “Home needn’t be that place. Come home.”

Jem tried to formulate arguments. Tried to explain that he was dangerous. Tried to tell him that it was a terrible idea but the arguments wouldn’t come together because whether or not they were true, they all meant letting go. He didn’t want to let go and without really deciding too, he was nodding and curling his fingers into fists in the back of Will’s coat to hold him close.

Home. This was home.

* * *

 


End file.
